Who Is Ahmed Al-Hada? With Introduction By Kevin Fenton

Thanks to www.cooperativeresearch.org

Kevin Fenton
4/26/2008

Ahmed al-Hada and his phone are one of the biggest mysteries surrounding 9/11. Although several US and other agencies knew he was involved with al-Qaeda, the 1998 African embassy bombings, and the 2000 USS Cole attack, al-Hada was allowed to continue to operate and was a key link in 9/11.

The surveillance of al-Hada’s phone by the US provided enough information to prevent 9/11 – there were numerous calls between the al-Hada family, under NSA and CIA surveillance in Sana’a, Yemen, and 9/11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar, al-Hada’s son-in-law, and Nawaf Alhazmi in the US. These calls were intercepted and analyzed by the NSA and could have been used to discover the hijackers’ location in the US – at least one of the US phones used was registered to Alhazmi, who the NSA knew was an al-Qaeda operative. But this did not happen and the reason has never been sufficiently explained. Why did the US not exploit the information from al-Hada’s phone to locate the hijackers in the US roll up the plot? How many calls to/from the hijackers in the US did the NSA intercept?

It appears that al-Hada was allowed to operate after the embassy bombings – where he was a key connection between Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the bombers in Africa – because it was thought that surveillance of him would reveal other plots. Reportedly, the monitoring was productive and the FBI was even able to map al-Qaeda’s global organisation based on the intercepts and many plots were prevented, surely important achievements.

However, al-Hada is then said to have been involved in the attack on the Cole – the bombers that carried out the operation used his phone to “put everything together” before the bombing. One question is, if the NSA was listening in on the bombers putting everything together, why could the attack not have been prevented? Second question: why was al-Hada not shut down after the Cole attack? If the policy was to let him operate and then hope to close down the plots before they came to fruition, the 17 dead sailors on the Cole were stark proof that this high-risk plan had failed. After the Cole, al-Hada had helped murder 240 people, 29 of them Americans. What did he have to do to get arrested?

Additionally, al-Hada must have known that he was under surveillance, because his son Samir was questioned following the embassy bombings, and the facility he ran – a safe house as well as a communications hub – appears to have been mentioned in a 1999 trial in Egypt (the “Trial of the Albanian Returnees”). Incredibly, al-Hada, despite being one of the US intelligence community’s leading sources of information on al-Qaeda, was mentioned at the New York trial for the embassy bombings, in February 2001. His name (translated al-Hazza in this case) was read out in open court, as was his phone number, and his close connections to the embassy bombers and Osama bin Laden were highlighted. This subsequently appeared in a State Department press release and the global media before 9/11.

In intelligence terms, it could not have been clearer to al-Hada that he was under surveillance. This was a blunder by the US of enormous proportions, as normally the surveillance target would realize he was under surveillance and cease his activities, shutting off the flow of information. However, in an even greater blunder al-Qaeda continued to use al-Hada’s phone for its communications, and, according to MSNBC, the 9/11 hijackers made at least one call to it after al-Hada was named at the trial. One can only wonder what bizarre string of events led to al-Hada being named in court, presumably at the insistence of the FBI and prosecutors, and what the NSA and CIA thought of this. One must also wonder why al-Qaeda kept using the damn phone after this. The Yemeni authorities were notorious for turning a blind eye to a spot of jihad – was there some sort of deal?

Finally, where is Ahmed al-Hada? He is said to have been arrested in 2002, was wanted in 2005, but was reported to be in jail in 2006.

There are dozens of other questions about the surveillance of al-Hada (such as where is the NSA inspector general’s report on 9/11? What terrorist plot did Almihdhar and Alhazmi discuss on the phone in early 1999? Why did the calls to/from the US rate only two cryptic mentions in the 9/11 Commission report? Is this related to the “Judy Miller warning”?). In March and April of 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey used one of these calls to justify increased NSA powers post-9/11, finally generating some attention from the media. Hopefully, these leads will be pursued and we will get some answers.

End Part I